Sunday, August 23, 2015

The Unauthorized “Full House” Story (Side Street Post/Lifetime, 2015)

Last night I watched the so-called “world premiere” on
Lifetime of the film The Unauthorized “Full House” Story, a TV-movie about the production and run of a TV
sitcom called Full House that I
never watched when it was on (from 1987 to 1995) and haven’t seen an episode of
since, either. Of course I’d heard of some of the people who appeared on it,
including John Stamos, Bob Saget (though I knew him only as the host of an even
more putrid show, America’s Funniest Home Videos) and the twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who
following my usual “rule” about child stars managed to achieve adult success
and psychological stability only by getting as far out of show business as they
could and embarking on another career once they grew up. In their case, they
managed to become hot-shot fashion designers, and though I’ve never heard of anything
they’ve designed (let’s face it, along with sports, fashion is one of the few
aspects of popular culture I’m even less interested in than I am in TV
sitcoms!), I can respect them for finding a career path that allows them to interface with celebrities without having to be part of the
red-carpet scene themselves. Since I’d never seen an episode of Full
House when it was new, nor was I
particularly interested in catching up on it now (I had vague memories of the
title but that was all), I probably shouldn’t have been watching this movie
except that Lifetime’s previews made it seem quite salacious, both sexually (at
one point John Stamos is dating Paula Abdul and he’s asked about it by an MTV
reporter, who then humiliates him by saying, “You’re still on that kids’ show,
aren’t you?”) and capitalistically (with the Olsen twins — who were double-cast
as the same character on Full House;
it’s a common dodge for producers to get around California’s laws limiting the
hours children can work by casting a pair of identical twins as a single
character — emerging as the stars of the show, their agent demands that their
salary be doubled — “each,” he quickly adds, meaning that the producers will
have to pay four times as much to them via their parents, who are having their
own argument since their dad wants to grab every quick buck he can from their
new-found fame while their mom wants them to have something of a childhood). Alas, The Unauthorized
“Full House” Story, despite some momentary
points of interest, was as dull and stupid as the show itself — as I’ve said
several times here already, I’ve never actually seen an episode of Full
House but judging from the samples included
here, the show was actually dull, stupid and excruciatingly unfunny. (Then
again, I find that true of virtually all alleged TV “comedies” — the nicest
thing I could say about them was what Dwight Macdonald said about the movies of
the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that “in form and intent can be called
comedies” — and all too often I’ve watched a TV sitcom in which the laugh track
howls with laughter and I want to take it aside and say, “What the hell do you think is so funny?”)

Though the film credits a
director, Brian K. Roberts, and a writer, Ron McGee, arguably its real
auteurs are the casting directors, Fern
Champion and Jackie Lind, who not only had to come up with actors who were
reasonable simulacra of the three adult stars of Full House — John Stamos (Justin Gaston, who if anything I
thought was even hotter than the original!), Bob Saget (Garrett Brawith), and
Dave Coulier (Justin Mader) — but had to come up with two actors apiece to play
the two older kid stars as they had aged during the show’s eight-year run
(Shelby Armstrong as the younger Candace Cameron and Brittney Wilson as the older
one; Dakota Guppy as the younger Jodie Sweetin and Jordyn Ashley Olson as the
older one), and three pairs of
identical twins to play the Olsens: Blaise and Kinsley Todd as the toddler
Olsens; Calla and Tyla Jones as the twins at age 6; and Kylie and Jordan
Armstrong at age 9. There was another Full House cast member, Andrea Barber, who also had to be
played by two people: Aislyn Watson as the younger one and Jaime (that’s a
girl) Schneider as the older. The series opens with Bob Saget congratulating
his friend Dave Coulier for having just landed a gig on the cast of Saturday
Night Live — only the producers of SNL withdraw the offer as quickly as they made it and
Coulier responds by leaving his cordless phone in the microwave and looking
like he’s about to take out his frustration by roasting it. Saget gets an offer
to be comic relief on CBS’s morning program, but he’s fired almost as soon as
he starts. Full House is the
brainchild of writer-producer Jeff Franklin (Matthew Kevin Anderson), whose
original idea is called House of Comics and is about the racy, raunchy adventures of three young straight male
stand-up comics sharing a house and each trying to break into the big-time
entertainment business — only when he pitches it to ABC, they tell him that due
to the success of The Cosby Show
(a name that plays very differently now than it did in 1987, when Bill Cosby
was considered the wholesome avatar of family values on TV — little did we know
then that in his dealings with women he was essentially Dr. Huxtable and Mr.
Hyde!), so on the spot Franklin tells them that one of the comics will be a
single dad (his wife having died three years earlier) raising three daughters.

With Bob Saget still busy on his CBS show they cast the pilot with John Posey
in the lead — only after it’s completed and ABC buys the show, once Saget is
fired by CBS and is therefore available again, Franklin fires Posey and
reshoots the pilot episode with Saget. The Behind the Headlines documentary on the real Full House cast, crew and staff shown immediately after the
movie includes interviews with both Franklin and Posey on this typical example
of Hollywood heartlessness, with Posey having long since reconciled himself to
losing out on a potentially career-making gig (he looks down and mumbles a lot
the way Pete Best used to when he
was interviewed about how it felt being fired by the Beatles just before they
broke through to superstardom) and Franklin justifying it by saying he’d always intended the role for Saget, that he’d conceived the
part around Saget’s approach and way of delivering lines, and therefore once he
was available it was a no-brainer to go with the actor for whom he’d crafted
the part in the first place. The rest of the Full House TV-movie cycles through a surprisingly dull set of
occurrences centered mainly around the fear of the parents of the child actors
on the show that Saget’s notoriously dirty mouth (when the story starts his
ambition is to become a stand-up star and Richard Pryor and George Carlin are
his stated role models) will unleash expletives they aren’t ready for their
kids to hear. In order to bond and become the best friends the show’s scripts
say they are, Stamos and Coulier suggest a trip to Las Vegas, and Saget
reluctantly goes along, leaving his wife behind — only when the other guys come
up with three women (no doubt hookers, though like its prototype this is still
enough of a “family” show that isn’t spelled out) to be their “dates,” Saget
begs off — it’s implied that he’s never had sex with a woman other than his wife, which makes it all the more
tragic when at the end of the run of Full House they divorce, mainly because taking on America’s
Funniest Home Videos on top of Full
House has made him so busy he hardly ever
has any time with their kids, and in one of the best lines of McGee’s script he
wryly comments that he’s spent eight years playing the single dad of three
daughters, and now that the show is over he suddenly is one.

Aside from that genuine moment of domestic
tragedy, and Coulier’s short-lived (two years) marriage while Stamos seems to
be nailing every young, attractive, available woman in Hollywood while carrying
a torch for Lori Laughlin (Stephanie Bennett), the actress brought into the
cast of Full House in mid-run to
play his on-screen girlfriend. Rumors persist that Lori was the great love of
Stamos’s life and the main reason they never got together was they were never
both single at the same time; though they’d dated briefly before she joined the
show, she was married when she was cast, and by the time she and her husband
broke up Stamos was already in love with model Rebecca Romijin (Ashley Diana
Morris) — the other cast members pronounce her last name “Romaine” and made me
briefly wonder why John Stamos had fallen head over heels for a head of
lettuce. The show offers little about the post-Full House lives of the cast members, and you’d have to keep
watching during the Behind the Headlines documentary to find out that not only did Candace Cameron marry a
Russian hockey player, Victor Bure (pronounced “burry”), she met at a celebrity
hockey match organized by Dave Coulier, but as a hard-core Christian (as is her
brother, Growing Pains star Kirk
Cameron), she wrote a book boasting of being “submissive” to her husband and
essentially letting him run their lives, which of course drew the predictable
hackles from all those hopelessly retro feminists out there. What’s more, the
film didn’t depict Jodie Sweetin’s descent into alcohol and drugs even though
one would have thought that, out
of all the aspects of the story, would have been the strongest and most
familiar territory for Lifetime’s filmmakers to work — according to the doc,
she eventually got into rehab, it actually worked, and like a lot of other
ex-addicts she took up addiction counseling as a career. There might have been
some interesting Lifetime movies locked up in the Full House story, but for the most part this is a pretty bland
and boring story, offering little of the titillation promised by the
“unauthorized” in the title — this is such a whitewash, quite frankly, Jeff
Franklin could have written it himself!